


Prompt: I would that it were otherwise

by EssayOfThoughts



Series: MCU Maximoff Oneshots [126]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Regency, Alternate Universe - Still Have Powers, Arranged Marriage, Codependency, F/M, Gen, Period-Typical Sexism, sort of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-21
Updated: 2017-06-21
Packaged: 2018-11-17 02:22:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,696
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11265948
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EssayOfThoughts/pseuds/EssayOfThoughts
Summary: Pietro runs ahead of the hunt, never astride a horse, for what horse could be as fast as his own legs? He can race past a stag, grab it’s antlers, wrestle it into the ground before any man has his gun aimed. He can catch ducks and doves from the air, he races the hounds and past them, does dancing acrobatics that none can match and his strength and his speed are seen as no more than hisright,for he is a man.Wanda is a woman, and so she goes to the women’s meetings. When the women with powers are asked to come forward, to show their gifts, Wanda holds a cataclysm in her hands and they cower.





	Prompt: I would that it were otherwise

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Nanyoky](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nanyoky/gifts).



> Written for a prompt on my tumblr, readable [Here](http://essayofthoughts.tumblr.com/post/162097864730/prompt-classic-regency-au-familybenefactors). I listened to [Ark - Ascension](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Esn-borkNDk) while writing this.
> 
> Also, I seriously considered calling this fic Cataclysm, except I knew that would be mean and a let down.

**i.**  
People turn from Wanda and the scarlet at her fingertips. They do not turn from Pietro. Wanda wishes it were otherwise, some days - so does Pietro, if only so his sister was no so pained - but this is the way of the world: Pietro is a man, and so people look gladly to his power. Wanda is a woman, and so people fear so much power in her hands.

Pietro runs ahead of the hunt, never astride a horse, for what horse could be as fast as his own legs? He can race past a stag, grab it’s antlers, wrestle it into the ground before any man has his gun aimed. He can catch ducks and doves from the air, he races the hounds and past them, does dancing acrobatics that none can match and his strength and his speed are seen as no more than his _right_ , for he is a man.

Wanda is a woman, and so she goes to the women’s meetings. When the women with powers are asked to come forward, to show their gifts, Wanda holds a cataclysm in her hands and they cower.

 

* * *

 

 **ii.**  
“I would that it were otherwise,” Pietro whispers to her. They are sitting in the windowseat watching the rain. She leans against him, his fingers stroke gently over her hair. “That they judge you for this... whatever gives us our powers, heredity, some nameless god... you have your powers. You bear that burden. No one else can do it in your place.”

Wanda closes her eyes, tilts her head further against his chest and shoulder. “They do not see that, though,” she whispers back. “They see a woman with power, and they fear her.”

 

* * *

 

 **iii.**  
Wanda will never have a spouse, she has known this since they were ten years and six months old and she had woken screaming from a nightmare. Pietro’s eyes had been wide and as bright as the blue that chased him as he dashed to her, Laura’s eyes had been wide and watchful when she had come in and passed through the scarlet without fear.

Others fear her. Everyone fears her. Even _Clint_  fears her, the kindest guardian they could wish for.

(He does not fear her for _her_  though, and that helps some days, knowing his fear stems more from another’s actions and the potential of her power than for anything she has yet done or that he thinks she might truly do.)

(It still hurts though, that of all the uncounted lives in the world, only two have never feared her.)

Wanda will never have a spouse, no matter if she wants one, for there are none with the power and mind to match her.

 

* * *

 

 **iv.**  
“I would that it were otherwise,” Laura tells her as they sit there, sewing. Laura sews one piece of embroidery, perfect in every stitch, arrows wrapped in hyacinths and feathers around the edge of a handkerchief and Wanda, linked into her mind and the patterns of her stitches, sews half-a-dozen more, floating scarlet making many out of one. “They fear you and that you might do to them as they would to you, if they had your power.”

“They do not know me,” Wanda says softly. “And if they act like this, think like that, they never will.”

Laura’s hand is gentle on Wanda’s when she sets down her needle and thread. “One day,” she promises. “One day you will have someone who can match you.”

Wanda has long grown skilled at hiding the doubts she feels.

 

* * *

 

 **v.**  
Pietro hunts with the local men. Some very very few of them are gifted, and of them, some far fewer are near as gifted as he and his sister. There is Vision, gifted creation of imprecisely-gifted Mr Stark of the next town over. A creation of Mr Stark and another creation and another creation, an amalgam of made things that is infinitely more than his parts. There is James - “Bucky,” he says, “Please.” - a man with as many scars in his mind as on his skin, and a missing arm filled in by well-crafted metal and magic.

Wanda goes to the women’s meetings and listens to people telling her to be demure and to be kind, to learn all these women’s arts - painting and singing, an instrument and sewing and perhaps a little theology and of course, always, a touch of wit, but not enough to shame the men. Wanda looks at the scarlet curling out of her fingers, the cataclysm she can hold in the palm of her hand, and wants to laugh. What good do these skills do her, once she has learned them, if people still fear her gift?

Sometimes she wonders: _Is it even a gift?_

 

* * *

 

 **vi.**  
“I would that it were otherwise,” says Clint, “But the people of the town are starting to talk. That you are too powerful, too untamed by any man, that you are a burden to us and that you shame us, that you have us under some magical charm or spell and that someone must take you in hand before you must be killed.”

Wanda looks at the palms of her hands, at the scarlet that loops around her wrists and creeps up her fingers and coils out of her palms and fingertips like snakes and vines and swinging ropes of power. “I would that it were otherwise too,” she whispers. “I do not know how to salvage this.”

 

* * *

 

 **vii.**  
Pietro has always been dedicated to one thing more than anything else: the protection of his sister. When their powers had first burst out of them, when they had first realised how people would fear all Wanda’s deceptively simple scarlet could do, Pietro had danced into the spotlight and claimed it, pulled it to himself and his new gift so people would not notice the wisps of scarlet in Wanda’s hands as she fought to control the boundless skein of twisting reality in her palms. When they had grown and Wanda’s powers had been known by all he had helped her prove them to be helpful and harmless, catching those who fell, stitching clothes back to perfection, a waved hand putting right an askew hat.

But he cannot protect her from this, this fear of the cataclysm Wanda can hold, and so he will protect Wanda from the people who fear in whatever way he can.

“My sister,” he says to his friends. “There is much gossip in fear of her. I cannot imagine _why,_  there is none more kindly than she.”

 

* * *

 

 **viii.**  
“I would that this were otherwise,” Vision Stark tells her when they meet. “That this was not...” he pauses, looks around the room to the corner where chaperone Pietro is pointedly engrossed in his book rather than his job.

“So awkward?” Wanda fills in with a smile. “I do not think Pietro means either of us any harm. At the least, I know he would never see me harmed, so he must not think you a threat to me.”

Vision tilts his head, watches her. “I do not think we _could_  be threats to each other,” he says, turning a hand that fades to near-invisibility as he shows the intangibility he is so famed for. “There are few quite so powerful as we.”

 _Ah,_ Wanda thinks. _So this is why Pietro believes in this one._

Someone so close to her own power that they have no reason to fear.

 

* * *

 

 **ix.**  
Wanda looks to her brother at dinner, watches him closely as he speeds around the table, fetching rolls for Cooper and a ladleful more soup for Lila and waits until the Bartons go to settle in the drawing room before drawing him aside.

She does not need to speak for him to know why she does this. He does not need to speak for her to know his defence. Wanda sighs.

“Next time,” she says, “Some forewarning, my brother?”

 

* * *

 

 **x.**  
“I would that this were otherwise,” James Buchanan Barnes - “Bucky,” he says, “Please.” - says to her. “But your brother has explained to us the problem, and I do not think he cares to see you hurt.”

“You are his friend,” Wanda says to him. “Do you think he would see you safe from harm as well?”

Bucky’s smile is small and clever, his eyes seeing far more than just the surface of things. “Perhaps,” he says. “But not as safe as he would see you.”

This man’s mind is scarred, whitewash flaking slowly from hidden memories, his metal-and-magic arm whirring softly at his side, as attentive and reactive as a limb of flesh and blood. Wanda wonders if it is made as Vision Stark was made, some mingling of science and the ephemeral powers so many gifted have but cannot fully pin down.

“You do not fear me,” she says, frowning and confused. “After all you have been through and after all my brother has told you of what I can do. Why is that?”

Bucky turns his hand of metal and magic, lets gears whirr and shimmers of energy wisp out as he flexes his fingers as though stretching muscles. “After all I have been through,” he says, “I know I can survive.”

 

* * *

 

 **xi.**  
Wanda knows what Pietro intends with this. Safety crafted from nothing but his will and his friends and a choice offered to her of whom she might pick, all parties aware of why this is arranged in the first place.

Wanda bound to someone who would not making it binding, but who is powerful enough, strong enough, that others will think her tamed.

Wanda sits on her bed, holds a cataclysm in her hands, and thinks.

 

* * *

 

 **xii.**  
“I would that this were otherwise,” she says to Bucky when he has risen from his knee. “I would that we were not so bound because others decided I had to be. That we had a chance to know one another properly before rushing into this.”

Bucky’s hand is gentle on hers, metal-and-magic thumb running over the metal-and-magic ring he had offered her.

“We may still get to know one another,” he says. “I do not see why not.”

 

* * *

 

**Author's Note:**

> Please leave comments!


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